Thursday, January 22, 2015

Marijuana Bandwagon Rolls Along And That's (Mostly) A Good Thing

APOCALYPTIC LEAFLET IN A BUFFALO, NEW YORK STORE WINDOW (1967)

There is
some good news amid the torrent of police shootings, terrorist attacks a
little too close to home for comfort, travails of the middle class and
the blatherings of a dysfuctional political establishment: The embrace
of gay rights and abolition of draconian marijuana laws have accelerated
at breathtaking speed in a society in which positive change comes with a
painful slowness, if at all.

These seismic shifts have a common denominator: They make sense.

A
majority of Americans endorse gay rights, including support of same sex
marriage, and are in favor of decriminalization, if not outright
legalization, of marijuana because they know that there is
nothing inherently wrong with homosexuality or smoking marijuana despite
religious and legal prohibitions, and in the case of pot, penalties for
even simple possession that do not begin to fit the "crime" that are a
result of decades of federal government-sponsored misinformation, scare tactics and fear
mongering.

There also is a huge difference in these seismic shifts: Money.

While
it is the right thing to do, no one is going to make a buck because
gays are afforded the same legal rights as straights, while a growing
number of state and local governments, as well as entrepreneurs looking
for the next big thing, see financial windfalls in licensing and taxing marijuana cultivation and sales, and permitting the sale of food and beverages
with pot as an ingredient.

An
astounding (for this old head, anyway) 23 states and the District of
Columbia have at least decriminalized marijuana possession. Colorado,
Oregon and Washington state have legalized pot and licensed its sale
outright, nine states have both medical and decriminalization laws,
eight states have medical laws, and four states -- including usually
neolithic Alabama -- have decriminalization laws. And more are about to
join the crowd. Alaska, Arizona, California, New Hampshire
and Nevada are on the short list of the next states to jump on the bandwagon.

* * * * *

Count Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper among the converts.

Hickenlooper,
63, grew up in suburban Philadelphia in the 1960s and was bombarded
from an early age with the familiar smorgasbord of government-pedaled
lies: Marijuana makes people crazy. It turns them into sociopaths, even
murderers. And it is a gateway to the harder stuff like cocaine and
heroin. While Hickenlooper would never admit as much, it is likely he
smoked or at least tried pot at the Main Line boy's school he attended
or later at Wesleyan University. This was about the time a future president by the
name of Bill Clinton was smoking but famously not inhaling.

And it is just as
likely that none of the classmates of Hickenlooper and Clinton became
poster kids for the propagandistic evils of the illegal weed while their
elders were consuming so-called legal drugs, including pain- and
reality-killing alcohol and pills. The
negative impact of their use and too often their abuse -- addiction,
drunk driving, broken families, domestic abuse and divorce -- far
outweighed the consequences of smoking the occasional joint and getting the midnight munchies.

Hickenlooper
worked in Colorado as a geologist in the early 1980s
and stayed. He eventually got into politics and started a microbrewery
in a trendy Denver neighborhood. As his statewide profile grew, he
came out against nascent efforts to soften the state's tough marijuana
laws and opposed Amendment 64, the successful 2012 ballot measure legalizing
cannabis for adults and allowing commercial cultivation, manufacture,
and sale, as well as limited home cultivation, effectively regulating
pot in a manner similar to alcohol.

Today Hickenlooper is a changed man and concedes that the consequences of letting
people grow, sell, and consume pot without risking arrest have not been
as bad as he feared.

"It seems like the people that were smoking before are mainly the
people that are smoking now," the governor says. "If that's the case, what
that means is that we're not going to have more drugged driving, or
driving while high. We're not going to have some of those problems. But
we are going to have a system where we’re actually regulating and taxing
something, and keeping that money in the state of Colorado, and we’re
not supporting a corrupt system of gangsters."

Legalization,
licensing and taxing -- allowing anyone 21 or older to walk into a store
and walk out with a bag
of buds, a vapor pen loaded with cannabis oil, or a marijuana-infused
snack -- has been a financial windfall for Colorado.A record $36.5 million flowed
into state coffers in November 2014,
the most recent month for which data are available, according to the
Colorado Department of Revenue, which projects out to $438 million a
year.

Meanwhile, legalized marijuana has taken the investing
world by storm as investors have bought into so-called
marijuana stocks with enthusiasm, causing share prices to skyrocket.
According
to Arcview Market Research, the industry generated $1.53 billion in
revenues in 2013 and was expected to jump to $2.5
billion in 2014-- a robust 40 percent growth rate year over year --
primarily because of the widespread and growing decriminalization of
medical marijuana.

* * * * *

Supreme Court Justice
Louis Brandeis's legendary praise
for states as the "laboratories of democracy" has gotten a vigorous
workout as state after state has decided that beyond potential revenue windfalls, a ride on the bandwagon is preferable tocontinue to clog its court systems and prisons with penny-ante marijuana cases.

Indeed, the bandwagon had to get rolling somewhere,
and even some politicians who oppose legalization have been comforted by
the fact the federal government isn't driving it. Lest
investors think that the sky's the limit, the federal Drug Enforcement
Agency is still occasionally raiding marijuana
dispensaries in states that have decriminalized such businesses, and the
incoming Congress is decidedly more conservative than its
predecessors in terms of potentially legalizing marijuana at the federal
level.

But for the most part, the Justice Department has allowed the bandwagon to keep rolling.

Last August, the deputy attorney general issued a formal -- though
nonbinding -- assurance that the feds would take a mostly hands-off
approach as long as state governments pursue "strong
and effective" regulation to prevent activities such as distribution to
minors, dealing by gangs and cartels, dealing other drugs, selling
across state lines, and weapons possession. Justice also has been
quietly working with the Treasury
Department to reinterpret banking laws to allow state-licensed pot
businesses to have checking accounts and take credit cards, thereby
avoiding the dangers inherent in cash-only businesses.

Washington Monthly writer Mark Kleiman has noted that the
systems being put into place in Colorado, Oregon and Washington roughly
resemble those imposed on alcohol after Prohibition ended in 1933. That
is, competitive commercial enterprises produce the marijuana and
competitive commercial enterprises sell it.

The post-Prohibition
restrictions on alcohol worked
reasonably well for a while, but have been substantially undermined over
the years as the beer and liquor industries consolidated and used their
economies of scale to lower production costs and their lobbying muscle
to loosen regulations and keep taxes low.

"The same will likely happen with cannabis," Kleiman warns. "As more and more states
begin to legalize marijuana over the next few years, the cannabis
industry will begin to get richer -- and that means it will start to wield
considerably more political power, not only over the states but over
national policy, too.

"That’s how we could get locked into a bad system in which the primary
downside of legalizing pot -- increased drug abuse, especially by
minors -- will be greater than it needs to be, and the benefits, including
tax revenues, smaller than they could be. It's easy to imagine the
cannabis equivalent of an Anheuser-Busch InBev peddling low-cost,
high-octane cannabis in Super Bowl commercials. We can do better than
that, but only if Congress takes action -- and soon."

I won't hold my breath waiting for Congress to do much of anything, and I happen to inhale.

In
fact, as someone who was introduced to the benign delights of the evil
weed in the year that apocalyptic anti-marijuana sign appeared in a
Buffalo store window (as in nearly 50 years ago, man) the trend toward
legalization is welcome but still rankles this old head because of the
tiresome tendency of capitalism -- whether in the form of states taxing a
recreational drug that hurts no one to cannabis entrepreneurs selling
to folks like me who just want to chill on their own terms -- to exploit people.

My not so secret hope is that because marijuana is so damned cheap and easy to grow (it's not nicknamed "weed" for nothing), it will get still cheaper and still easier to grow because of the legalization bandwagon, state revenue agents and Anheuser-Busch InBev be damned.

4 comments:

I suppose it is a seismic shift, but speaking as someone who was immersed in a culture that took pot for granted over forty years ago (not quite as long as yourself) it seems slow in coming. The high prices do seem absurd (as you say) given how easy it is to grow. Because of this I expect regulation will play a large part in it's future, partly in order to keep the profit margins high. That said, the black market will likely continue, as well as a plant or two hidden in the vegetable patch. I hope the deputy attorney general's assurance is just the beginning of saner federal policies, because a lot of lives have been ruined over the decades for no justifiable reason.

About Me

Shaun Mullen was born to blog. It just took a few years for the medium to catch up to the messenger. Over a long career with newspapers, this award-winning editor and reporter covered the Vietnam War, O.J. Simpson trials, Clinton impeachment circus and coming of Osama bin Laden, among many other big stories. Mullen was a five-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and has covered 12 presidential campaigns. He is the author of "The Bottom of the Fox: A True Story of Love, Devotion & Cold-Blooded Murder" (2010) and "There's A House In The Land: A Tale of the 1970s" (2014). Both books are available for sale online in trade paperback and Kindle editions. Much of Mullen's work is archived and can be accessed online in the Shaun D. Mullen Journalism Papers in Special Collections at the University of Delaware Library.